AI spending growing 75% per year at the median firm | An AI agent that argued back against design ideas helped designers improve | A design is a hypothesis: try to defeat it | AI can generate superior accessibility when it prioritizes communication density over narrative completeness | Skeleton screens buy patience, not speed | Checkout design dials the pain of paying up or down

New music video about hedonic adaptation | AI better at some forms of knowledge work than at others | AI increasingly used for sensemaking among corporate users | Users want to approve certain autonomous actions | For exploratory creation, a branching UI beat the traditional linear chat interface to the AI backend model | Base-rate neglect: one vivid anecdote outweighs a thousand statistics | The ***** UI for user ratings | Experimental system connects specific words in the u

Cognitive load is the mental effort users spend to perceive, understand, decide, and act within an interface, drawn from a working memory that holds roughly 4 chunks. The design task is allocation: spend that scarce budget on the user’s goal, cut everything else, and mind the new debts run up by open loops and Slow AI. 26 design guidelines show how.

AI technical capabilities are exploding, but sophisticated use crawls | Synthetic personas exaggerate demographics | AI hurts education when used wrong | Professor Brad Myers is a UX hero | In the future, we’ll all be Agatha Christie | Mental accounting gives users separate budgets for separate expenses | Grok releases upgraded image model

Show a progress indicator when response time exceeds 10 seconds, preferably as a percent-done bar. It tells users two things: the system heard you, and here’s how long the ordeal will last. But never let the bar stall, lie, or reset. AI agents that work for hours have raised the stakes: progress indicators must now serve users who walked away. Follow the 12 design guidelines in this article.

Keep It Simple | AI uses fact flooding to overwhelm users and persuade them | Deep AI integration in business processes | 5 personas for adopting AI | Using AI to change the tone of voice of your writing | Timelines: a chrono-based UI | AI improves cybersecurity | Increasing use of AI agents for online shopping

Describe an option as a gain, and people play it safe; describe the same option as a loss, and they gamble. No presentation is frame-free, so pick the frame that maximizes comprehension, and audit your funnels for frames that merely maximize clicks. Every screen is a framing device. Yours included.

AI is the biggest change to UX design in 60 years, yet we know embarrassingly little about how people actually use it. Here are 76 open research questions, organized into 7 lists sized for everyone from high school students to the big AI labs. Students who complete a research challenge gain the two qualities employers now screen for: agency and demonstrated AI experience.

Users don’t choose the best option; they choose the first satisfactory one, and then they stop looking. This behavior, called satisficing, decides which link gets clicked, which default survives, and which of your features nobody ever sees. Design so that the first plausible option is also the correct option, and the lazy click becomes the right click.

Design guidelines held steady for 30 years but are shifting with AI | Users who are anxious about AI use it more, not less | A toggle is a light switch, not a form field | What are the Erdős problems and why are they relevant for AI? | An ambient monitoring interface with glanceable feedback on agent progress cut errors in hal

Users adapt to good design the way lottery winners adapt to wealth: the thrill fades and the baseline resets. Hold a design constant, and its satisfaction ratings will sag year after year as expectations rise; my rule of thumb is a drift of 2–5% annually. Budget continuous improvement just to stay level, and spend it on killing recurring irritations before adding sparkle.

Agent-ready web design lifts AI task success | Shoppers now pick AI assistants over brand websites, 41% to 38% | Learn from reality: build and iterate | AI getting better at business strategy, but still not good enough to run your company | AI raised the floor but lowered the ceiling in children’s storytelling | Infinite canvas as a UI space for organizing and collaborating on unstructured information | My Hero: Scott McCloud, comic book artist and theorist | AI animates clas

Almost every screen you design is assembled from 10 basic interaction elements: buttons, forms, menus, links, dialog boxes, alerts, icons, checkboxes and radio buttons, tabs, and search. Each is decades old but still misused daily. This article defines the GUI design alphabet, traces its history, and distills 86 evidence-based design guidelines, plus bonus coverage of windows and the pointer.

Comparing GPT 5.6 Sol, Opus 5, Kimi K3 | How designers use a UI design agent | AI enhances users’ agency, and they like it | Breadcrumb navigation | UX Hero Doug Engelbart | The decoy effect in pricing plan comparison pages | The paradox of the Active User | Delhi High Court rules that AI training on copyrighted content is legal in India

Carousels are scanned in an L-pattern, not the F-pattern | Making AI-Native games playable | Bulk actions support flexibility and efficiency of use | AI film wins a bronze lion at the Cannes Festival | Use of AI applications doubled in one year